Saket Tripathi in Magento 2.0Online Booking and Reservation

Endless Possibilities With An Online Booking System

What is an Online booking system?

An Online booking system is the easiest way to find and book the services over the internet. Online booking system software allows the customer to book services directly from the booking website. These services vary, they can be travelling services, appointment booking e.g doctor, beautician coach or tutor, booking tickets for movies etc.

How does an online booking system work?

Let us take the example of an online hotel booking system-

(1) Gather all the information

Collect all the information about your services and update them in your software, e.g. room category, inventory, room rates, room description, amenities, images of the room etc. All these information have their own significance that will surely help in attracting customers.

(2) Booking by customer

Once all the information has been updated in your software, let them book your services through the following criterion.

Date of check-in
Type of suite
Any extra services
Date of checkout

(3) Auto Update On Availability Status

All the data is then passed into the system which can be accessed by website owners to manage the bookings. Then the availability status is updated automatically.

(4) Auto acknowledgement through mails

Most of the booking systems have a default feature to send emails to customers after their booking and also after check-outs.

(5) Get customer’s feedback and send running offers

Include a short feedback form in the post-checkout emails sent by default to the customers.

According to Statista, online travel sales worldwide from 2014 to 2020. In 2016, global online travel sales totalled 564.87 billion U.S. dollars. This figure is projected to grow to 755.94 billion U.S. dollars in 2019.

Source: Statista

What is the scope of online reservation and booking business?

Online booking system, building a better tomorrow

Every booking business aims to sell more services and make better profits. Without an online booking system, you will have to rely on phone calls and walk-ins only, to make reservations. In such cases, you may or may not get reservation or appointment on the spot. An online booking platform is the need of the hour.

There is a “Wide” scope of online booking system because of considering below benefits.

Benefits of having a website for your business may include:

24/7 availability

An online booking system works round the clock throughout the year. This gives the facility to the customer to book services anytime they want, and it also maximizes your sales because you are not limited to your working hours. Compared to a traditional booking system, an online booking system does not constrain you with opening hours. Furthermore, customers can look for your services at their most convenient time.

Customer convenience

Online booking systems ensure convenience and comfort to the customers. The convenience of online booking system is one of the biggest advantages of the internet. The customer does not need to stand in a queue and can book online right from the comfort of their home. The Internet has extremely eased accessibility with customers using the internet and reaching anywhere in the world.

Efficient management

You would not be worrying about overtime pay for your staff. Online booking system reduces costs and runs round the clock. Your staff won’t be tied to a phone waiting for guest calls. What’s more, you will be able to take bookings at any time.

Easy tracking

With online booking system, you can utilize online booking tools for tracking results. These tools can be used to keep track of each reservation and all the related details. Thus you will have all the information to better understand your customer and their preferences.

Easy and secure payment

Nowadays transactions have become very easy. You can do this through a digital payment service so that there is no need for a customer to pay in cash to book the services. For security purpose there are a number of payment gateways Advantage over your competitor- Nowadays, customers use the Internet to discover everything they need to know. If you don’t have an online presence, you are most likely missing out on a great many opportunities. You can get a competitive edge with an online booking system.

How to make an online booking system website?

To build an online booking service website (hotel/services/appointments/rentals) you can go with either of the two options: Create one from scratch or go with an existing solution.

Building your website from scratch will require a team of good developers, testers and managers, not to mention the huge amount of investment and time this process would require.

So it is advisable to go with the second option and choose one of the existing platforms in the market and customize it according to your needs.

There are two types of e-commerce platforms: one which is self-hosted (they need to host on a dedicated server) and other one is SaaS or can say subscription based.

With SaaS systems, you won’t have to worry about your server, its maintenance, security, updates, etc. Everything is managed by the SaaS providers so you can just focus on running your store. You’ll just have to pay the subscription fee for their platform. It’s the only downside is that it doesn’t come with any customization option.

If you want an option where you can control everything from your website’s design to its features you’ll have to go with an open source e-commerce solution.

Magento is one of the most popular open source eCommerce platform, as they have lots of users constantly designing new plugins and extensions.

This also helps to make their platform extremely flexible and infinitely scalable, which is one of the reasons why Magento is often considered by many to be the premier e-commerce platform.

The best thing about the Magento Community Edition is that it’s an open-source platform, where developers and site owners have complete access to the source code and can completely modify the functionality of their site to accommodate their needs.

You can create an online store just by configuring your database and installing Magento on a server.

Now to add booking or reservation type products you’ll have to install an extension that would enable such functionality. That would allow you to add booking or reservation type products to your inventory and present them in a user-friendly way to your customers.

What we are offering

You can also create an online Booking marketplace with Online Booking and Reservation System from CedCommerce which encompasses all the essential features you’ll need to create a full-fledged booking website. It will also allow multiple sellers to add and sell their booking and rental services on your website.

Online Booking and Reservation System helps the admin to enable online reservations and bookings for the properties. There are 3 types of bookings, namely: hotel booking, rent (hourly) and rent (daily) – that can be enabled with the help of this extension.

Features of our online booking and reservation system

For Admin (Store owner)

Freedom to create types of bookings on the basis of hours or days or as suits their need.
They can list and manage facilities.
Put hotel rooms into different categories.
Admin can manage the orders.
Admin to manage booking settings.
Admin can set flexible commission on your seller’s services and earn a share on each sale of seller’s items.
Dates, timings, rooms and their facilities can be easily configured.

Customer

Online Booking and Reservation system allows the customer to book online and reserve products.
Customers can even locate hotels or rentals on your product pages with google maps.
Can explore all of the amenities that your place offers.
Can look for all the Facilities that your place operates or run.
It has a Smart Filtering feature that enables your customer to find the desired services easily according to their specific requirements

Vendor

Dedicated seller panel from where they can manage their shops on your website.
Can create hotel booking type products, rent daily and rent hourly type products.
Can manage orders.

You can refer to the following link in order to know more about description, and Pricing etc.

Booking Marketplace